It is believed that good speakers make great presenters. It is true that you need to speak well to communicate effectively to the audience. But, guess what differentiates a good speaker from an ordinary one. Practice.

Good orators practice their skill over and over again before the show begins. My point being, everybody can be good at speaking if they put in the effort and practice hard at it. You need to run full-length rehearsals well before the presentation is scheduled. You need to master your body language when you express certain ideas, work on intonations for thoughts that are critical, and practice body movements—like keeping your hands around the area of your stomach and breathing deep.

If you have difficult sections in your presentation, rehearse them a number of times as long as it takes to make you confident. Put on the shoes of your audience to intuit the kind of questions that they might pose. Get ready with responses. Be as prepared as you can be.

Time your sessions. You don't want to fall behind or rush ahead. It will only add to the anxiety levels that you might be carrying before the session starts. During rehearsals, jot down the time you are consuming on each topic. Append some buffers for the questions that the audience might pose.

These are several ingredients that make a good speaker. Everyone can aspire to be one, and all it takes is effort and not innate talent.

You might think that fresh presenters have a problem with controlling their anxiety levels before the presentation begins. Wrong! Yes, they feel the nerves, but so do the experienced ones. All good and confident speakers feel a tinge of anxiety before you start to speak and up until a point where you feel you have adjusted to the new environment and the flow has set in.

Regarding the anxiety levels, it is not about having them, but rather being in control of them. This is the difference between good speakers and others. Good speakers, with practice behind their backs, will have some anxiety to start with, but through their confidence coming out of backbreaking preparation they are able to control it. If a presenter has not practiced, then he or she might feel it is hard to control their nerves as there are likely to be topics that are relatively alien to the presenter as they are to the audience. Probably, the presenter does not know what he or she needs to cite, and what kind of questions may be posed to them.

If a presenter does not feel a rise in anxiety levels before the presentation is due to begin, either the speaker is overconfident or does not care a damn about the outcome of the presentation. Both cases are not beneficial. Overconfidence signifies egotistic behavior and it can have repercussions in looking down upon the audience, and if the speaker does not care about what the audience thinks about the presentation, it is likely that there would be minimal feedback and the outcome of the feedback will have no impact on the speaker. Throughout this book, I have been stressing on the importance of feedback, and overconfidence and narcissism could overthrow the essence on which these principles are built upon.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have speakers who are irrationally nervous. There is no reason to their madness. Presenters who I have spoken to have various reasons for their increasing levels of anxiety. The audience not liking the face and style of the speaker, the speaker forgetting the words and the examples during the show, and the speaker finishing early without sufficient material to go through to the end are some insane reasons for the rising anxiety levels. My answer is simple, and I am repeating what I have stated earlier. If there is sufficient practice before the presentation, there is no reason to be irrationally nervous. If you have prepared well across all pillars, there is no reason why the audience will find reasons to hate you. Remember that the audience is listening to you because they want to benefit and not to find reasons to put you down. They want you to succeed, and that is the only way they are going to get anything solid from the presentation and the time they have invested.

To summarize, some amount of anxiety is good, as long as it is under control. Don't get overconfident or irrationally nervous.

Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount on a hilltop next to the Sea of Galilee. He did not have any props or any material that he used to deliver the sermon. In our case, it is quite different. We have a number of aids, namely an overhead projector, motorized white screens, wireless connections to the projector, lighting, laser guns, and many more. While we master the presentation delivery, body language, intonation, and breathing, we must also get familiarized with the technology that we leverage upon.

We need to invariably get accustomed to every gadget that we employ. We don't have a choice these days to have assistants to take care of technological aspects. The presenter must be an all-rounder!

What happens if the speaker is not aware of all the gadgets that he or she employs and requires help from some of the audience or other staff to get it to work right? Well, speakers work on a rhythm that helps them in the flow while they present. If the presenter has to pause, take help, and then move on, the rhythm is broken and the distraction would have caused irreparable damage to the flow and to confidence levels.

Secondly, whenever help is sought, it eats into the time of the presentation. This leads to unnecessary delays, and once again comes back to haunt the presenter to finish the presentation on time—meaning they rush through the topics, which can upset the effectiveness of the communication and the flow.

My advice is simple. Find out all the gadgets that you are going to use. Get familiarized with them. If you can visit the conference room and connect your laptop to make sure it works fine, it would be the icing on the cake in regards to the preparation you have made.